The orchid takes its name from the Greek orchis, testicle, for the paired rounded tubers of the Mediterranean species known to the ancients; Theophrastus described the plant under that name, and by the doctrine of signatures its twin roots gave it a lasting reputation as a plant of virility, fertility and desire, a folk reputation recorded here as history. The orchid family is one of the largest of all flowering plants, of extraordinary diversity, and includes the vanilla vine, whose cured pod is the source of the flavour. Across cultures the orchid's exotic, intricate and long-lasting bloom made it an emblem of luxury, refinement and rare beauty.
Vanilla, the orchid family's one major food crop, was first cultivated by the Totonac people of Mexico's Gulf coast, who prized the cured pod as a sacred and medicinal substance long before the Aztecs, who conquered the Totonac in the fifteenth century, adopted it to flavour xocolatl, the bitter chocolate drink later brought to the Spanish court, so that the modern flavouring reached Europe by way of two successive Mesoamerican civilisations rather than directly from a single source. Orchid seed is famously among the smallest of all flowering-plant seeds, containing almost no stored food of its own, so that in the wild almost every orchid depends on a specific symbiotic fungus simply to germinate at all, a genuine botanical fragility behind the family's reputation for rarity and difficulty.